Douglas McLennan's blog

This Week: The next wave of arts journalism layoffs begins... Lots of debate about the role of artists in the Trump era... Prominent Canadian artists petition the government to "fix" support for creativity... It's getting harder to define what "home" is... Is "mindfulness" overrated?
Three More Big City Newspaper Arts Writers Call It Quits: A new wave of reductions in arts coverage have … [Read more...]

This Week: Did settling the Pittsburgh Symphony strike just kick the can down the road?... The idea of progress is a fragile (and recent) notion... Why should this arts funding depend on encouraging bad behavior?... The art establishment is caught in an increasingly high-stakes investment battle... We celebrate reading - but has the dissemination of ideas and knowledge moved on?
Pittsburgh … [Read more...]

This Week: That Mike Pence goes to "Hamilton" story? A textbook protest... Finally - some real data on the health of orchestras... Arts criticism is either being reborn or it's in dire shape... Pop culture is getting to be only for the rich... The myth of the outsider is a standard pop culture meme...
The Arts And Our Next President: Many many many stories this week about artists reacting to … [Read more...]

This Week: Hard to imagine there are arts headlines to compete with election news, but here goes: Science tries to explain why we're ideologically segregated... It's not just politics - arts and entertainment don't really know what their audiences want... Even the most-respected arts coverage is being cut back... Infighting on the jury of the National Book Awards point to how deeply we're … [Read more...]

This Week: Record ticket sales at the Chicago Symphony but still a budget problem...Wall Street Journal cuts arts coverage and Boston Globe gets a subsidized critic...Why did Shakespeare's Globe fire its director?...Two cities on opposite sides of a border, share common arts culture... Who will hold intelligent machines accountable?
An Ominous Report For Orchestras? The Chicago Symphony … [Read more...]

This Week: Why has dance attendance fallen off a cliff in New York?... Applications for MFA programs are down and things are looking bleak... Has our ad-supported business model for content killed quality?... There's a big surge in art that addresses political issues... Bob Dylan, and what he means.
What's Caused A Precipitous Drop In Dance Attendance In NYC? New York is the center of the … [Read more...]

This Week: Did Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for literature expand the category to songwriting?... Artists protest against gentrification... We're deeply conflicted about the value of creativity... Is Google rewiring our brains so they don't work so well?... Are we all living in a giant computer simulation? (don't laugh)
American Wins Nobel Literature Prize (Just Not The American Anyone … [Read more...]

This Week: The movie industry is undergoing a top-to-bottom revolution... Claim: teaching humanities fights racism... Outing the identity of Elena Ferrante sparks debate on privacy... Now may be the best-ever time for music... Do we really need an Olympics for the arts?
Big Changes In How Movies Are Being Made: Hollywood had a rocky summer. The studios invested big in blockbusters but they … [Read more...]

This Week: Three orchestras now on strike as audience waits... Two other orchestras report record success... A museum raises $100 million in just three months... Bots are getting awfully good at making art... More links between being bored and being creative.
A Bad Week For Three Orchestras: The audience was sitting in Verizon Hall waiting for the Philadelphia Orchestra to take the stage … [Read more...]

I suggested in a post this week that, based on the lack of any arts business before the 114th US Congress, that it appears that lobbying for the arts seems to be failing. Yes, the NEA/NEH budgets have stayed more or less stable for the past few years, but the almost complete lack of any action on policy related to the arts suggests the arts have no place in a national agenda. And I suggested that … [Read more...]

Americans for the Arts Action Fund PAC has released its 2016 Congressional Arts Report Card rating members of Congress on their support for the arts. Many lobby groups do such rankings as a way of "holding politicians accountable" for how they vote on issues the lobbyists care about. The rankings are then used to support or punish those who vote or don't vote on issues the lobbyists designate and … [Read more...]

This Week: Why is it so hard to tell if American theatre is thriving or not?... Have art and technology had a falling out?... Perhaps TV is the solution to our political polarization... The music industry seems to be finally getting it together... A cautionary tale about getting swallowed up by the online world.
Theatre: The Best of Times or the Worst? Why is it so difficult to judge the … [Read more...]

Every age is illuminated and shaped by its innovations. In my father’s time it was cars. At the turn of this century it was desktop computers. More recently it’s been mobile devices. If you were interested in innovation in any of these decades these were the technologies you got excited about.
My dad’s generation waited eagerly for the latest models of cars, learned how to take them apart and … [Read more...]

There's been a change in the news coming out of symphony orchestras over the past summer. Usually there's a background drumbeat of struggle as orchestras fight to stay alive. But for months now, the beat has shifted, and we're hearing about orchestras that are not only surviving but thriving.
Yes, Fort Worth Symphony musicians are on strike, the Pittsburgh Symphony is in the middle of … [Read more...]

It appears many of us want a formula for creativity. There are 11, 386 books on creativity for sale on Amazon, most of them promising to unlock the secrets of being creative. Scientists studying how the brain works are mapping the brain's responses to creativity - music, color, art - as well as trying to measure neural activity when we are creative.
There's a long way to go to understand how … [Read more...]

Douglas McLennan

I’m the founder and editor of ArtsJournal, which was founded in September 1999 and aggregates arts and culture news from all over the internet. The site is also home to some 60 arts bloggers. I’m a … [Read More...]

About diacritical

Our culture is undergoing profound changes. Our expectations for what culture can (or should) do for us are changing. Relationships between those who make and distribute culture and those who consume it are changing. And our definitions of what artists are, how they work, and how we access them and their work are changing. So... [Read more]